-- Published: Wednesday, 1 February 2017 | Print | Disqus
My Two Cents
By Andy Sutton / Graham Mehl
We’ll start out this week by prepping you. This article is going to annoy quite a few people. We’ll warn you up front that neither of us subscribes to the idea of political parties or platforms. We have the Constitution; that is good enough for us. We credit people like Dr. Paul Craig Roberts for having the backbone to be one of the early people to break out the box of pins to pop the balloon of idiocy that has been floating around the past few months. What we’re talking about is the kind of idiocy we haven’t seen since 2008 when one side of the political spectrum swamped into Washington DC and absolutely trashed the place. We’ll see if the other side can do better.
But this isn’t about hot dog wrappers and drink cups. It’s about Kool-Aid. It’s about misconceptions, dogmas, delusions, and flat out tomfoolery. It’s about selling out and being sold out. It’s about posterity, about our kids, their kids, and what We the People are doing to try to leave them with a better world than we were given by our parents. It’s about heart. And backbone. It’s about courage and the willingness to stand – even if you stand alone.
We have had this essay written for quite a while, but didn’t feel the people were ready for it. We are a small publication and we’re totally ok with our station in life. We are where we believe we are supposed to be. We also know that anything political tends to grow legs on its own, especially when you’re bucking the dogmas of the time; the zeitgeist if you will. Ok, so we just gave it away; we might as well lay the cards on the table.
How Much Did the Election Really Matter?
We know untold hundreds of millions – well over a billion in fact – were spent trying to convince people of something that was by and large already decided. The entire time all this money was being spent, the US Government was busy cooking up a story of the Russians hacking the election. The best one we’ve heard yet allegedly came from Putin himself, who reportedly said ‘If only I could hack your elections – I could have saved you from Obama’. Gotta hand it to the Russians. They won round one, almost by knockout with a one-liner for the ages. But was it really Obama Putin allegedly could have saved us from? Is one man the problem? Is another the solution? We think not.
Since so many out there claim to want to follow the Constitution, and are continuously calling on it to be followed instead of an endless slurry of Executive Orders (EO), Presidential Decision Directives(PDD), and signing statements, let’s look at what the Constitution actually says about what a President should be and more importantly, what a President should do. The President fills one of three equal branches of government – the Executive Branch – along with the Vice President. The principal job of the Executive is to ensure that the laws Congress passes get executed in a manner specified by Congress. Article II, Section II of the Constitution enumerates the duties of the President:
“The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments. The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
Section 3
He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.
Section 4
The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
For the sake of both thoroughness and brevity the contents of Section 1, which covers the selection process for the Office of President and Vice President is stated here.
At any rate, according to the Constitution which the President takes an oath to protect and defend, he/she is given very limited power. There is no mention of any of the tools we talked about above. We challenge anyone to find in the Constitution where it says the President can draw up an Executive Order giving his/herself the ability to take over basically all the infrastructure of the United States. If you follow the link you’ll see that the EO claims to get its authority from the Constitution, but then goes on to list other laws as alternative/concomitant sources of authority. The Constitution sure doesn’t give one person the power to do all these things, so the other laws cited are, by definition, unconstitutional.
So, given the above, and the limited powers allocated to the President by the Constitution, which was intended by its framers to provide for VERY limited Federal government, why all the hubbub about who wins an election?
This is where the Kool-Aid comes into the frame. 2008 was about ‘Hope and Change’. This time around, the slogan was ‘Make America Great Again’. We’ll ask again, given the very limited powers allocated to the President by the Constitution, how is one person going to accomplish all this? Certainly the President can champion certain policies and make recommendations to Congress and all the politicking and quid pro quo that goes on every day in every power center on Earth.
The President and Policy
Who exactly sets policy for the United States? We’ll use the national debt as an example, not only because it’s an area we are very familiar with, but it is a well-known construct. A few articles back we focused on the national debt and how it has been growing without fail, regardless of who is in the White House, Congress, or Grant’s tomb. The national debt is the result of the totality of policy decisions covering the last 60 years at minimum. Does anyone remember hearing any Presidential candidate campaign to bring a massive debt to America? Anyone remember hearing anyone campaign to make it so massive so as to destroy the underpinnings of the American economy? We’ve certainly heard many a candidate campaign on a platform of limiting government, and fiscal responsibility, but it never happens. Congress is blamed. Circumstances are blamed. The Man in the Moon is blamed.
The truth is that Presidents don’t set policy; and if they start to, then it is time to worry. If you want to know what sorts of policies a President is going to champion, then look at the people who are surrounding him/her. The Cabinet. Fill it with a bunch of regular Americans and you’re going to get a completely different outcome than filling it with a bunch of Goldman Sachs bankers and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, just to name a few.
The problem is that Americans aren’t educated in the schools about the CFR and other such groups. Many believe their very existence is nothing but a conspiracy even though they all have websites and are rather transparent – much more so than your government.
Presidents end up being little more than lightning rods. They are the ones who people either cheer for or get mad at depending on the issues involved. This is done intentionally so that the attention is spent on them rather than those behind the scenes who are really to blame for much if not all of what has gone wrong in this country for decades now.
The not-so-USFed is another great example. It exists as a private institution, created by Congress, essentially unaccountable and most people think it is a government entity. Congress created it, so logic would follow that Congress could eliminate it. The Constitution specifically gives Congress the responsibility of handling the coining of money and regulating the value thereof (Article 1, Section 8). It was an international project to manipulate the Congress to violate the Constitution by creating a private bank of all things. It remains the policy of groups like the CFR to keep such illegal institutions in place because those institutions serve the needs of the globalists. The President has nothing to do with it. The claptrap we occasionally hear from Donald Trump and his camp about auditing the not-so-USFed is just that. Note his new Treasury Secy nominee isn’t interested in an audit. Shocker. Just ask JFK about the ‘fed’. Since we’re so big into EOs now, if Mr. Trump is serious, his first act in office ought to be crafting an EO that ends the reign of theft of the private federal reserve, seizes any assets it has, launches a full investigation, and jails those who have committed crimes against the United States and its citizens. This will never happen. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault. Maybe he really would love to get rid of the central bank, although we kind of doubt it; the system we have in place now made him rich along with the rest of these cretins we allow to control our destiny.
This doesn’t match with the policy sought by the globalists who are the ones who really run most countries these days. They have enslaved the better portion of the world with their centrally managed fiat money and government system. These are just a couple of examples.
Intellectual Honesty and Politics ??!!??!! Really!!!!
When you stop laughing we’ll conclude. By and large, the American people are so deluded that their ‘vote’, if you will, is available for purchase. Make some loud promises about the issues that are on their minds at that time and you’ll be in good shape. You don’t need solutions, just rhetoric and slogans. It won’t matter if you don’t deliver; the candidate can blame Congress, the Russians (it seems the Russians are the cause of all that ails the world these days) or anyone or anything else that is convenient and you’re set. That’s if the people even remember. They used to say that the average American’s political memory was a year. This was quite a while ago, but we’d opine that it is probably close to a few months – if that.
Here is our gripe with the current situation. Many on the right demanded a President who would uphold the Constitution. A noble position. But then they demand of their President things which he cannot legally do if he’s going to be true to his oath to protect and defend the Constitution. A pre-requisite to protecting and defending it is actually following it. So we have a giant disconnect here. That means no EOs. That means no signing statements. Even the American Bar Association weighed in on signing statements long enough to take the position that such statements, which are becoming more and more popular, serve to “undermine the rule of law and our Constitutional system of separation of powers”. Upholding the Constitution also means no PDDs. Many of the PDDs in existence have to do with ‘national security’ and as such are classified.
Conclusions – Completely unscientific and absurdum infinitum
The conclusion, insomuch that it is a conclusion, is that none of this is going to change. Much in the way Economics is the allocation of scarce resources and the scientific study thereof, politics is the allocation of plentiful nonsense, charades, empty promises, and Hollywood-esque cheap shows. It’s a reality show as Gerald Celente aptly points out. There’s no science behind it. While we aren’t sure where the concept of drinking the Kool-Aid came into the discussion of political dogma, it surely is an insult to Kool-Aid to attach it to such a sordid state of affairs. We think a new beverage is warranted, given that one of the big slogans of this last Presidential Idiocy Show was to ‘drain the swamp’. We nominate Gatorade, because after all, gators live in the swamp too.
Graham Mehl is a pseudonym. He currently works for a hedge fund and is responsible for economic forecasting and modeling. He has a graduate degree with honors from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania among his educational achievements. Prior to his current position, he served as an economic research associate for a G7 central bank.
Andy Sutton is the former Chief Market Strategist for Sutton & Associates. While no longer involved in the investment community, Andy continues to perform his own research and acts as a freelance writer, publishing occasional ‘My Two Cents’ articles. Andy also maintains a blog called ‘Extemporania’ at http://www.andysutton.com/blog.
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-- Published: Wednesday, 1 February 2017 | E-Mail | Print | Source: GoldSeek.com
